Who Built Offa’s Dyke? April 14, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval , trackback
Offa’s Dyke is an important earthwork that runs along, very approximately, the English Welsh border. Its name comes from the little known (but apparently impressive) eighth-century Mercian king Offa (obit 796). The problem is that the dyke’s name may be a misnomer. Certainly, over the last generation there have been increasingly forceful attempts to wrest the credit for building the Dyke from Offa and hand it over, instead, to some earlier ruler, Anglo-Saxon, Celt or Roman. Indeed, the Dyke has been redated to the seventh, the sixth, the fifth and even to the third centuries. So what is the evidence and can any redating be supported?
Let’s deal with the positives here at the outset. First, there is the question of Offa, king of the Anglo-Saxon Midland kingdom of Mercia, and his connection with the earthwork. The only substantial early medieval evidence that Offa built the Dyke (which is turned, btw, unambiguously against the Welsh) appears in Asser’s Life of Alfred, c 890 where Asser (a Welsh man) states categorically that Offa was the dyke’s architect:
Fuit in Mercia moderno tempore quidam strenuus atque uniuersis circa se regibus et regionibus finitimis formidolosus rex, nomine offa, qui uallum magnum inter britanniam atque merciam de mari usque ad mare fieri imperauit.
In recent times, there was a certain king in Mercia, vigorous and terrifying to all the kings and regions around him, Offa by name, who ordered a great wall to be built between Wales and Mercia, from sea to sea.
At this point the reader might even be wondering why we should bother having an argument about the dyke: Asser, after all, is a near contemporary and he is definite. But there is a vociferous minority of Anglo-Saxonists led by Alfred Smyth, who claim that Asser’s Life was a later forgery. It is fair to say that the majority of early medievalists are on the other side of the debate. But in this case we can neatly sidestep all the nasty house-to-house fighting and note, instead, that the placename Offan Dic (Offa’s Dyke in Mercian) appears in an Anglo-Saxon charter dating to 854, so the idea that Offa built the dyke was already floating around at least a generation before Asser. As noted above Asser is the only early substantial evidence. But this single placename, though slighter, speaks with a loud voice.
Now what is the evidence against Offa, the proof that Offa’s Dyke is older?
Well, there have been (i) some attempts to reread early Roman texts, with a mix of later Welsh and Irish sources: Bad Archaeology has done a characteristically fine job of disposing with these allegations so we’ll leave them on the compost heap of revisionism. (ii) In 1997 some remains of a fire was found under a dyke ‘between’ (understood very roughly again) England and Wales. This was carbon dated to the mid fifth century, not the mid eighth century. However, this was not Offa’s Dyke but Wat’s Dyke, an earthwork to the east of Offa’s! The only really outstandingly good evidence for an earlier Offa’s Dyke is (iii) some much more recent carbon dating that puts part of the Dyke at Chirk from ‘430 to 652’. This is pretty provoking stuff, but it is one isolated result. It will have to be seen whether other finds along the dyke offer other dates and whether these correspond to the same period.
Let us, for now, take the recent carbon dating on trust. How does this square with the Mercian Offa? There are broadly speaking three solutions.
First, the dyke was ‘work in progress’ created by various Mercian rulers but associated with Offa, who was believed to have contributed most.
Second, the dyke somehow became wrongly associated with ‘great’ Offa in the years between his death and the first use of the name in 854: the more I think about this one the less I like it.
But then there is a third solution – suggested, to the best of my knowledge, by Alfred Smyth in the early 2000s – that Offa’s Dyke was built by Offa, but another Offa and Asser (or the Asser forger) got confused (something that is absolutely credible). Here it should be noted that the Mercian royal genealogies say that the royal line began with Woden and that his great grandson was called Offa.
Of course, if we accept the third possibility we also need sub-possibilities: the wall was really dug by early Offa; it came to be believed that early Offa dug the wall (though he didn’t); or even that a series of Mercian rulers dug the dyke but that early Offa was chiefly remembered. Still another possibility is that the Dyke was named for a mythological character Offa in much the same way as Grim (Woden) appears as a dyke’s ‘owner’ in southern England: was Wat (of the nearby Dyke) even Wot = Woden?! Carbon dating should allow us to sharpen perspectives in the next years. Exciting times…
And if you enjoy strange stories (why else are you here?) then follow this link for the details of an attempt to make Offa into a Muslim
24 April 2014: The great Mike Dash with some thoughts on Offa and his (?) Dyke. ‘Enjoyed your coverage of the dyke today, having read about the recent carbon dating a few days ago. The Great Wall of China looks like a useful parallel here. There were several distinct phases of building and repair, what we have today bearing only scant resemblance to what the Chinese started with. Something similar must surely have happened with Offa’s Dyke if it was in fact maintained as a defensive position for any length of time; earthworks in wet climates quickly disintegrate (see Battle of Passchendaele). One can conceive easily of a situation in which Offa, being the most powerful and well resourced of Mercian kings, ordered a thorough-going repair and re-establishment of decaying earlier defence works, and had his name associated with the result. As you suggest, only much more extensive carbon-dating is likely to resolve this, but the discovery of excavated earth dating to different periods in the same general location would surely point to it. I read a lot of Alfred Smyth when I was younger. I can still remember ploughing through Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles when I was 17 or 18 and it was all a bit over my head. WIthout taking sides on an issue where I am insufficiently expert, I have always thought the academy’s attack on his take on Asser has to be read with consideration of where studies of this period would be left if Asser was a later forgery. It would make it very difficult to write substantial histories of a period in which a lot of scholars have made their reputations. Not that this means Smyth is right, but it is a point to bear in mind.’ Thanks, Mike!
